Posts Tagged With: Narratives

When I was about 5 years old, my family moved from a mid-sized city to a house in rural New Hampshire. There were neighbors in sight of us, but we lived across the street from a wide stretch of open fields, forests and ponds. Our backyard had woods which, at the time, seemed a vast, unexplored wilderness.

One of my earliest memories from that house is of my Dad coming in to my room one night and waking me up to go outside so he could show me something. I slipped my bare feet into boots that felt rough and strange without socks, and followed him out into the backyard, still wearing my nightgown under my coat. At the edge of our driveway stood a tall tree, branches silhouetted against the sky. Halfway up the tree a porcupine crouched in the crook of a branch, his bunched up form dark against the moonlit sky. He moved slowly, if at all, as we stood there and watched him for what seemed to be a very long time, until the air got too chilly and I was whisked back to bed to dream about sleeping in trees.

Thirty-two years later, that moment is still with me as I imagine the life Sean and I will create for our soon-to-be-born son. We want him to know the woods and the water, to spend weeks living in tents and paddling down rivers and coasts, and to wake up in the middle of the night and watch animals come out of of their dens and feed. We want him to problem solve his way out of tricky situations, and grow up into the kind of man who doesn’t hide inside just because it is raining, or the path seems too slippery to walk on. We want to maintain our own connections to the wild world, and see having children as a chance to increase our experiences with nature, rather than a step backwards towards a life trapped inside walls. This blog is our way of sharing both our own experiences, and the information we’ve picked up along the way. Check in with us to find helpful information, stories about our experiences, book and gear reviews and links to other families involved in this same movement. We can’t wait to hear from all the rest of you out there wandering down the same crooked trail…

To learn more about where we are coming from, check out our About page.